This is a note to all my dutch speaking readers;
If you are willing to help me out for some research on mobile phone usage, internet on the mobile phone and marketing developments for mobile you can fill out a survey I’ve prepared.

I will be more than thankful for all responses and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have,

OK. This is another one of those problem solving posts. The last time I had a virus on my computer is over 5 years ago. I’m always very cautious about what to click and install and what’s inside those torrents. I always either ran Kaspersky AV or AVG Free.

Now I needed to solve a little problem with my girlfriends computer. Her laptop was infected by the so called XP Antivirus 2008 malware/virus and it was a real pain in the ass to remove!
It also was a real pain to find a proper solution to remove the virus and hijacking software, almost every solution I found online seemed not to be working and after every reboot her antivirus software found new threats. Continue reading →

Recently. I started having troubles with my Apple iPod Nano 2nd generation, 8GB (black). I didn’t have a clue what happened at first. I took it out of sleep mode and I got this strange white screen.

I didn’t hear any sounds as well because I disabled all the clicksounds etc. I used to experience some hangups before with some older firmware versions so I dediced to give the ipod a hard reset, switching on and of the hold button and then pushing menu+select. Continue reading →

Must have wordpress plugins, or at least, the ones I use on various blogs/websites.

First of all; Plugin Central. Install this plugin and from that point on you are able to install any plugin with using your FTP client. Works like a charm.
From there on I install many of the following, depending on the type of blog/website.

Doing research on local stuff, suddenly I stumbled upon the following universal search results, which I have never seen before. Google Movies. This feature is not yet available in the Netherlands, but here in Spain I noticed the following results:

Some more research in the .com/movies engine and the results are really thorough. Ofcourse, there are reviews available on the movies, which Google has taken from various news and/or trusted sources.

Great feature! wondering when it will be available in other countries as well. Have you seen these search results before? or any other newly added feature? Google might just be testing this feature for a while, because they add features all the time.

Who would have thought, that David McClelland, back in 1961 came up with his Theory of Needs (based on Murray’s theory of motivation, 1938) and we see that one of his classifications (Affiliation) suits Social Media. Whilst mostly used for management purposes we can think of different benefits derived from these psychological reasons of users joining several social media networks and groups.

“Those with a high need for affiliation need harmonious relationships with other people and need to feel accepted by other people. They tend to conform to the norms of their work group. High nAff individuals prefer work that provides significant personal interaction. They enjoy being part of groups and when not anxious make excellent team members, though sometimes are distractible into social interaction. They can perform well in customer service and client interaction situations.”

Does this model apply to our current web 2.0 generation? What do you think?

If you are interested in reading the whole book (the achieving society), you can order it here.

Yahoo! announced yet another new mobile application called onePlace. This might be the killer app we are waiting for. Yahoo has been making a burst lately with releasing new mobile applications for the web. This one kinda came out of the blue. I wasn’t aware of any information about this product so far. Since it will be available in Spain, I will try and have a look at it at the end of Q2, when it’s set to launch.

This should be the year of mobile! , errr, wasn’t this the story from last year as well? Because mobile use of the web isn’t very popular, perhaps until now? Is this the killer application we were all waiting for?
Yahoo onePlace will make sure that a user’s web interests are finally available in onePlace (hence the name), including their mail, RSS, stock quotes, contacts, Flickr photos and other important stuff we deal with on the web . It dynamically updates all the necessary information in a single location, where it’s accessible via the mobile web. It’s fully personalized and contextual.

Yahoo! also announced that at the end of the 2nd quarter, European users can use Yahoo! Mobile Widgets to access localized information through Yahoo! partners, which include Eurosport Football, Myspace, Xing and Dopplr.

Yahoo! states that their services that are available for mobile include:
Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Maps, Flickr, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Music. Just in case you are using all of them 😉

If you are interested in some snapshots, click here. In the meanwhile, feel free to discuss, is this really going to be a killer app?